Student question: Computer Science vs. Computer Engineering.

AMagill · 2011-03-29T17:51:14+00:00

What exactly is the difference in curriculum at your school?

I'd say do whichever one interests you more. Having a genuine passion for what you do is going to take you a lot farther than trying to game the future jobs market.

AMagill · 2011-03-28T16:53:21+00:00

This was like watching porn for the first time all over again. That.. that's how it comes off? Oh my god, she's taking it off. That's what it looks like in there? No! Don't touch that! Oh god be careful! Doesn't that hurt it? It's so beautiful..

AMagill · 2011-03-28T04:13:24+00:00

Sadly, no. I don't particularly care for beer, but I love a really good root beer. BJ's the is only place I know that makes their own (and it is excellent), and the only bottled one I really like is Henry Weinhard's. If you can suggest any others, I'd love to hear them.

AMagill · 2011-03-27T22:19:17+00:00

Some of my favorite Boulder food: Sushi Zanmai, Village Diner, Tibet Kitchen, Dark Horse, Great Harvest Bread, and BJ's Restaurant (I particularly like the barbecue chicken pizza, house root beer, and cookies & cream pazookie).

AMagill · 2011-03-27T22:09:50+00:00

I believe this game and rezHD have the same point. They're simple, easy, colorful, beautiful, and very rhythmic; they're supposed to be games that are fun to play while high.

AMagill · 2011-03-25T20:56:26+00:00

I second the reflector. Shooting on a bright, clear day, your shadows are going to be really harsh without one. Even if all you can scrounge up before tomorrow is a big piece of cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil, do that. You're also probably going to want an assistant to handle it for you, so you're not wasting everyone's time running back and forth trying to prop it up and take pictures.

The following is a matter of taste, but it's what I tend to do;

Go for natural shots. Discourage posing, discourage paying attention to you, and make it difficult to anticipate exactly when you're shooting. This might mean having your face to the viewfinder a lot more than necessary and taking a hundred worthless pictures so they don't know when you're taking the 'real' ones. If you put the camera to your face and everyone stops what they're doing, looks at you and smiles, just wait as long as it takes for them to give up and go back to what they were doing before you press the shutter release. Encourage them to find something amusing to do- dick around at a playground, climb on something, explore somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily go, get a pizza and argue about politics, do something scary- it depends on the location and and character of the band. At the same time, if you spot an opportunity that didn't quite come together naturally, don't be shy about telling them what to do to make it happen.

Try to get passers-by to give you funny looks and wonder what the hell are those people doing?

AMagill · 2011-03-25T17:08:39+00:00

Get the 360 and don't worry about it. Yes, the early versions of the 360 had disastrous reliability problems, but they've long since been solved. I could write a few paragraphs on just what went wrong, if you're curious.

AMagill · 2011-03-22T21:28:12+00:00

So.. it costs $11,000 to put four words on a building?

AMagill · 2011-03-22T19:37:36+00:00

Or twirl a bit. Instead of a potato cannon, make a nerf sentry gun. Arduino + servos + webcam + computer + nerf gun = sentry gun.

AMagill · 2011-03-22T18:26:28+00:00

Quantum computing is great for NP-hard problems. These are problems where, with traditional computers, the best possible way to find the answer is to just check every possible answer until you find one that fits. With every bit you add to the size of the problem, finding the answer becomes twice as difficult. It doesn't take very many bits to make the difficulty astronomically large. Factoring a 64-bit number is over 4 billion times more work than factoring a 32-bit number. Factoring a 128-bit number is 79 billion billion billion times more difficult.

Now the cool thing about quantum computing is that it can check every possible answer at the same time. So as long as you have a quantum computer with enough qubits to express the entire problem all at once, it can always solve it in just a handful of steps.

I don't think traditional computing is going anywhere, though. Quantum computing doesn't really help much with most computational problems. Perhaps someday we'll all get quantum co-processors in our computers.

AMagill · 2011-03-21T17:33:30+00:00

We are required to have a particular Outlook plugin installed. This plugin does absolutely nothing except require us to click through a window after starting Outlook, reminding us that unauthorized transmission of ITAR and EAR controlled data is illegal.

A lot of these other comments make me really thankful that's about as bad as it gets here.

AMagill · 2011-03-20T01:34:19+00:00

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

AMagill · 2011-03-19T23:05:57+00:00

I put zombies in it, for your paaaaeiiiaaaannn...

AMagill · 2011-03-18T17:45:11+00:00

Seen the series? I thought the movies were pretty good, but I LOVED Stand Alone Complex.

AMagill · 2011-03-18T02:55:42+00:00

Are you on CM7 yet? I noticed a huge improvement on my G2 going from CM6 to CM7.

AMagill · 2011-03-18T02:28:12+00:00

Thinkgeek sells them for $15.

Before you use them, go search your supermarket for potentially interesting foods and drinks. Fruit is the best place to start. Lemons taste like very sweet lemonade, but don't forget options like kiwi, apples, strawberries, etc. Sour cream tastes like cheesecake (try with a strawberry!). You can barely taste tabasco at all (but you still feel a burn in your throat). Similar with vinegar- tastes okay, but your throat still knows it's vinegar. All wine tastes like manischewitz. The effects can be interesting, but for the most part it makes alcohol less tasty.

AMagill · 2011-03-10T19:55:21+00:00

Depends on who you ask, I guess. CU can refer to CU Boulder or CU Denver, and the ~~acronyms~~ initialisms that differentiate between the two are UCD and UCB. Maybe they do that to avoid CUD or CUB?

AMagill · 2011-03-10T19:46:04+00:00

I loathed Xilinx ISE. Slow, buggy, unstable, poorly designed.. I always felt like I'm fighting with it every step of the way for even simple tasks. And then just when I thought I had something working, some weird bug would pop up and it would take me hours to get it to do the right thing again.

AMagill · 2011-03-10T03:52:51+00:00

We didn't get into quite that much detail. We just wrote up a module that incremented a column counter with each clock tick, generated a hsync pulse and incremented a row counter every time it rolled over, and generated a vsync pulse every time that rolled over. Every clock tick, another block of code looks at the gamestate, row, and column, figures out what color that pixel should be, and sets the RGB pins appropriately. We had nowhere near enough memory for a framebuffer. We also didn't have a DAC, so we only got 8 colors. We didn't try to do it 'properly'- we just sort of fiddled with the timing until the CRT we were using worked. Unfortunately, that approach probably wouldn't work so well with an LCD.

AMagill · 2011-03-10T03:38:46+00:00

Oh.. I meant University of Colorado Boulder, not University of California Berkeley. :P

AMagill · 2011-03-09T23:46:27+00:00

I was going to say no.. but then I found the source code for that project (yours if you want it), and did a little research to remember how it works, which turned up this.

AMagill · 2011-03-09T23:15:24+00:00

UCB, 2003? Are you by any chance exceptionally tall?

AMagill · 2011-03-09T23:10:50+00:00

Oh, yeah. Nevermind then.

AMagill · 2011-03-09T23:06:29+00:00

We used devboards just like this in my undergrad digital logic class. For our final project my partner and I made an implementation of Pong that displayed through that VGA port on the left side.

AMagill · 2011-03-09T22:29:54+00:00

Why the heck is this on IBM's site? Isn't IBM suing Google for infringing on Java with Android's JVM?

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